You Can Keep Your IVF Story, Thanks

You Can Keep Your IVF Story, Thanks

(Photo: Steve Allen/Dreamstime) Who exactly is the movie Private Life for? Pretty much solely the person who made it.

The contemporary successor to the grueling 1970s vacation slide show (“And here’s Norman and I at the Grand Canyon!”) might be the IVF discussion. In every upscale area where middle-class couples gather over drinks, at any moment the discussion is liable to turn to the subject of an agonized struggle to start a family.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Private Life, which after debuting at the New York Film Festival will appear in theaters and on Netflix October 4, is the movie version: We begin with a reclining 41-year-old woman (Kathryn Hahn) getting a painful injection in the gluteus maximus from her anxious husband (Paul Giamatti). And we’re off: two hours of squabbling, waiting in doctor’s offices, feet in stirrups, taking vitamins, etc., etc. Hahn’s Rachel and Giamatti’s Richard are trying to get a child any way they can, also simultaneously pursuing adoption and seeking an egg donor, the latter producing a traumatic episode in which a young woman apparently eager to help them disappears without explanation after leading them on for some time. All of this is troubling to sit through but doesn’t shed much light. I can think of two groups of people who won’t want to see this movie: those who have undergone the process of in vitro fertilization and those who haven’t. If you’ve been through the agony, why would you want to relive it? If you haven’t been through it, why would you care?

So who is the movie for, then? Pretty much solely for the person who made it. It is unsurprising to learn that its writer-director, Tamara Jenkins, underwent IVF treatments, which would explain the loose, memoir-ish, and-then-this-happened format. The movie serves as a pretty good example of what can happen to even an accomplished screenwriter (Jenkins wrote Slums of Beverly Hills and got an Oscar nomination for The Savages) who can’t quite achieve separation from her subject. Basic imperatives of screenwriting are discarded, by which I mean this isn’t a story with a beginning, middle, and end. It’s more of a jumble of thoughts being sketched out over a jug of sangria.

The film is saturated with cinéma vérité detail — Hahn and Giamatti look haggard, ragged, and disheveled, and their book-strewn shambles of an apartment looks like an actual New York City flat instead of the usual idealized, uncluttered Hollywood recreations — but what’s most interesting about it is the stuff that is most obviously falsified. Rachel is a literary novelist who has been published in The New Yorker and won prestigious fellowships at Yaddo, while Richard is an acclaimed off-Broadway theater director. There isn’t a lot of money in these pursuits, which is why the New York City arts scene is teeming with independently wealthy people who don’t really need the cash, because they inherited it. Rarely do they live in such dismal straits as the couple in the movie. Jenkins herself is married to Jim Taylor, one of the most successful screenwriters working today and a winner of an Academy Award for Sideways. His other credits include Jurassic Park III, Election, and Downsizing. Taylor is the kind of guy who can make more money on a three-week rewriting gig than most people make in a year. Yet Jenkins dials down her family’s socioeconomic status about six notches to try to make Rachel and Richard more sympathetic.

I mention all this because I find it fascinating how taboos have shifted in American life: Jenkins is a symbol of our age in that she’s eager to delve into the most intimate details of sexual and reproductive life. When it comes to income, though, she’s as tight-lipped as a Park Avenue matron. After an entire generation of oversharing on matters bodily, hearing about people’s sex-related problems has gone a bit stale. Jenkins’s movie tries to add some spice by adding a few screenwriterly zingers, but these mostly come across as hopelessly cutesy. (“We wanted to ask you about your eggs,” Richard says to a young, female potential donor. “Scrambled is good,” replies the woman.) Jenkins’s plot twists, likewise, all wind up being dead ends. Frustrating to endure, no doubt, but frustration is not an emotion I seek out when I go to the movies. For all of the heartache going on in Private Life, as a narrative journey it winds up traveling approximately a quarter of an inch.

Recommended Articles

Most Popular

If the Democrats are really tempted by impeachment, bring it on. Since the day after the 2016 election they have been threatening this, placing their chips on the Russian-collusion fantasy and then on the phantasmagoric charade of obstruction of justice. The attorney general accurately gave the ingredients of the ...
Read More

One of the more remarkable developments of the last 50 years is the relentless commitment of a segment of the American academic and cultural elite to selling a vision of American life that is slowly but relentlessly proving to be — on balance — more harmful for children and less joyful for adults, while also ...
Read More

A few weeks ago, I noted that Louisiana’s state legislature is contemplating legislation that would bar makers of cauliflower rice from labeling their product “rice,” contending that consumers will get confused. Instead, the rice growers want the product to be labeled . . . “riced cauliflower.”
But ...
Read More

In 2012, Barack Obama was still president, indeed had four years left in his presidency. "Gangnam Style" was a world-beating music video. Game of Thrones had just gotten started. And, oh yeah, the climate scientist Michael Mann sued National Review over a blog post.
Seven years later, this case has gone pretty ...
Read More

Celebrity attorney Michael Avenatti was indicted by federal prosecutors Wednesday for stealing the identity of his former client, Stormy Daniels, in order to claim more than $300,000 she was owed for a tell-all book about her efforts to expose President Trump.
In the indictment, prosecutors for the Southern ...
Read More

New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait has continued his turn toward conspiracy theory with a new essay. Inspired by our “Against Socialism” issue, it's titled “The New Socialism Panic Is the Right’s Trick to Justify Supporting Trump.” The central thesis of Chait’s submission is that National Review ...
Read More

Affixing one’s glance to the rear-view mirror is usually as ill-advised as staring at one’s own reflection. Still, what a delight it was on Wednesday to see a fresh rendition of “Those Were the Days,” from All in the Family, a show I haven’t watched for nearly 40 years. This time it was Woody Harrelson ...
Read More

Every presidential primary ends with one winner and a lot of losers. Some might argue that one or two once-little-known candidates who overperform low expectations get to enjoy a form of moral victory. (Ben Carson and Rick Perry might be happy how the 2016 cycle ended, with both taking roles in Trump’s cabinet. ...
Read More

At the time of the Roe v. Wade decision, I was a college student — an anti-war, mother-earth, feminist, hippie college student. That particular January I was taking a semester off, living in the D.C. area and volunteering at the feminist “underground newspaper” Off Our Backs. As you’d guess, I was ...
Read More